Ben Shoemate's Notebook

(author unknown) via Webware.com shared by 4 people

Shared by ntutak
Go Yammer Go!

I recently covered Socialcast, a "Friendfeed for business," and liked it a lot. It takes emerging social interaction models that people are just now getting accustomed to and adapts them for business.

Here at TechCrunch50, the idea is also in evidence on Yammer, more of a "Twitter for business" that Socialcast, since it doesn't seem to be able to pull in external feeds the same way.

However, users can have threaded discussions, as they can on FriendFeed. Users can also use "hashtags" for tagging topics, and users can follow just those tags. Useful if you want to follow a project, but not necessarily all the people working on it.

Yammer will launch with a desktop AIR app, as well as iPhone and Blackberry apps, and an SMS interface.

The base product is free. Enterprise versions with admin tools and security features will cost you.

I really like this concept, but my fear is that this kind of product is too easy to build (especially on workgroup scale, as compared to the consumer scale Twitter has struggled with). What I don't see is a blocking business strategy. But I still like it.

The service is now live.

MG Siegler via VentureBeat shared by 4 people

One anchor for the cable news channel CNN has become enamored with the micro-messaging service Twitter over the past several weeks. He used tweets (Twitter messages) to complement his coverage of the recent Hurrican Gustav and now the network has apparently decided to take it one step further, basing a whole show around the real-time citizen journalism/opinions that take place on Twitter.

The show, called Rick Sanchez Direct, is scheduled to debut this afternoon, Sanchez let his followers know last week in a tweet. There appears to be a slight problem though: the limits Twitter has in place for number of users you can follow.

The company implemented this limit several weeks ago to reduce the spam that had started to creep into the system. It’s not a hard limit (earlier reports of a 2,000 limit were false), instead Twitter limits this number by several factors including the number of users that follow you back. (It has more about it on its blog.) The problem, as related to this new CNN show, is that to get the best information from Twitter, Sanchez will want to follow as many people as possible.

Right now Sanchez follows 4,607 people and apparently cannot add any more. You can be sure that CNN will want this number to be much higher to make sure it doesn’t miss anything worthy of the show. Sanchez’s producers have contacted Twitter about raising this number, but the limit he’s running into right now may be a bug.

“Rick Sanchez is being followed by almost 10,000 people people on Twitter—he should be allowed to follow at least that many. We’ve told the folks at CNN that we’re fixing this bug and we hope to get to it today,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told me over email today.

Bug or not, if this show takes off it could push Twitter closer to mainstream usage. When that happens, the service will have a lot more users approaching the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and maybe even millions of followers/following users.

But that is a good problem for Twitter to have. It’s now about scaling up to that level.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison and Dan Kaplan. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

Philipp Lenssen via Google Blogoscoped shared by 5 people

A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article from 1960, found in Google’s new newspaper scans search:

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Computer Is a Gentleman (Pic) | Comments]

[Advertisement] PingPongPie - the art of linkbaiting and social media marketing

Gina Trapani via Lifehacker shared by 10 people

Google says it's bringing history online, one newspaper at a time with a new initiative to digitize millions of newspapers—like this article from the 1969 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the moon...

via http://www.wired.com/images/slideshow/2008/09/gallery_cosmic_motors/Daniel_Simon_Galaxion.jpg

Leslie Hawthorn via Google Open Source Blog shared by 4 people

By Mark Callaghan, Software Engineering Team

Did you know that Google uses MySQL as part of its Ads system? As you can imagine, we demand a lot from this Open Source code base and so we have spent a fair amount of time enhancing it to work better in our massively scaled environment. In the past, we have published several patches and today we have a few more to offer. We expect several of these features to be merged into a future official MySQL release, and one of them, semi-synchronous replication, is already available as a MySQL feature preview.

All of the features in the patch are described on our project wiki. The features include:

• enhancements and bug fixes for features from the previous patch


• changes to make InnoDB run faster on multi-core servers


• changes to display mutex contention statistics


• changes to monitor and rate-limit activity by database account and client IP

We are publishing several patches:

• a patch for MySQL 5.0.37 with all of our changes


• a patch for MySQL 5.1.26 with the changes for mutex contention statistics


• a patch for MySQL 5.0.67 to make InnoDB run faster on multi-core servers

We hope these features we've Open Sourced will be useful to other developers. Check out the code and let us know what you think. We'd love to hear from you and answer any questions you might have in our Google MySQL Tools Discussion Group.

PZ Myers none@example.com via ScienceBlogs : Combined Feed shared by 5 people

I like it. This is a perfect analogy to creationist argument.

The theory of childhood, also known as child origin, is a damnable, loathsome and indefensible lie. How can any thinking person suppose all humans used to be babies once? There is no development path from babies to adults, no transitional forms between these two species. Show me even one baby with the head of a grown man on his body. Can you? No? Not even a bearded toddler? No adults with unfused skullbones, outside unfortunate disorders? Not even a tiny little newborn girl suddenly sprouting a respectable bosom? You can't find them, because they don't exist. There isn't a single transitional form between children and adults, and you will never find one because the theory simply is an unscientific lie.

The development of children has been well-researched in our six-month study following a sample of one thousand children and adults of various ages. We have conclusively proven that while there are minor changes in features like height and body fat, and replacement of deciduous teeth with permanent teeth, incontravertibly still every creature in the study that started out as a child had only slightly more adult features at the end of the observation period than at its beginning. Children and adults are separate kinds and there will never be sufficient changes to change one into the other. We reject any evidence from longer-term studies as we believe the laws of physics have changed within the last year.

To claim people come from children is demeaning and morally degrading. We have observed how children behave. If we acted like small children we'd all be demanding and impatient, and we'd be cheating, lying, and stealing from each other all the time. If the theory of childhood were true there would be no morality, and with no morality to build one on, no society. Childhood is a wicked lie used by charlatans to justify evils such as public schools.

There is no consensus on the theory of childhood in the scientific community. We should teach the controversy. Our children will be served well to learn that the prospect of them becoming adults is merely a theoretical idea. Many children come from families that do not subscribe to the theory of childhood, and they could be disturbed if the theory were taught as fact.

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bkuchera@arstechnica.com (Ben Kuchera) via Ars Technica shared by 4 people

Spore seems to be having a rocky launch: gamers are fighting back over what they perceive as unacceptable DRM, carpet-bombing Amazon with one-star reviews. The uninspiring game play isn't making things better.

Read More...

Jason via Signal vs. Noise shared by 4 people

Today we’re thrilled to be able to announce a big new addition to Basecamp: You can now attach files and post comments on to-dos and milestones. Previously this functionality was only available on messages.

Watch a bigger version of this video on the 37signals Product Blog.

A quick look at how it works

A green comment icon after a to-do or milestone means there are new comments on that item. A dark grey comment icon means there are comments on that item, but you’ve already read them. And if an item doesn’t have any comments, you’ll see an empty comment icon when you hover over that item. Clicking the comment icon will take you to the comments view for that to-do or milestone.

Deeplinking: A happy side effect

This new feature comes with a great side effect: You can now deep link to individual to-do items or milestones. Previously you could only link to a to-do list or the milestones section, but now you can link directly to individual to-dos or specific milestones.

Project management is communication

This new feature is directly in-line with Basecamp’s core premise: Project management is communication. Before you had to keep all your discussions in the messages section. That worked, but it required you to discuss one part of your project in another part of your project. Now you can have discussions about to-dos and milestones right on top of those to-dos and milestones.

We hope you love it

We’re really excited about this new feature. We think it’s going to help you get a lot more more out of Basecamp. Thanks again for your continued support!

Gina Trapani via Lifehacker shared by 9 people

New York Times writer Joe Nocera argues that the Windows operating system doesn't matter any more, because webapps are rendering all operating systems irrelevant. He asks: Do you really care anymore...